Saturday, August 17, 2013

Long time readers have heard me
mention that studying history helps us understand the future and under my blog
title it says “The future has already happened”. I believe that human behavior repeats itself
generation after generation, as we can easily see if we go back and look.

The philosopher Santayana put it differently when he said, “Those
who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I disagree. History
repeats itself because of the character of man, not his neglect of history, and
no matter how diligent we might be at studying the past, we still can’t escape
from ourselves.

The study of antiquity becomes more interesting when we
realize that people have always acted the same. We see these behaviors repeat
in cycles and can compare them to what’s happening in the world today. Even
though we have developed a brain capable of taking us beyond what mere
“animalness” can accomplish, we’re still animals. Yes, we developed civilization
quickly – the pottery wheel,
agriculture, trade, cities, metallurgy, armies, political systems – all between
4000 B.C. and 500 B.C, but we remain jealous, hateful, militant, distrustful,
power hungry, and greedy.

I recently came across a paper by Ian Morris, professor of
Antiquity at Stanford. The paper, “The Collapse and Regeneration of Complex Society
in Greece, 1500-500 B.C”, was written in 2005. I plan to discuss this paper in a
future post but for now I would like to discuss Professor Morris himself. Not
being familiar with his work, I looked him up and discovered his recent book,
“Why the West Rules for Now.” I read a review where it was mentioned that
Morris was summoned to CIA headquarters to talk about his book.

Spooks into antiquity? Go figure! Reminds me of the FBI
interrogation of Indiana Jones when they were trying to understand Hitler’s
interest in the occult.

So what is it this time?

Why the West Rules tells the history of the world and
then reduces the accomplishments of societies to an equation. Morris believes
that history moves forward as a giant amorphous mass and is only minimally
influenced by individuals or ideas. To him, there are three main forces acting
on society: geography, climate, and the paradox of development. The latter
refers to the fact that societal development is accompanied by forces which
tend to undermine its progress.

And people are the problem. “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened
people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. And
they rarely know what they’re doing.”

Morris
has developed a theorem which claims that by mathematics one can determine which is the dominant culture on earth at any one time, and further, the formula can be
used to predict the future. An index derived from the theorem is calculated
using four characteristics of a society: energy capture per capita, social
organization, the capacity to wage war, and the level of information
technology. Each of these factors is assigned a value up to 250 so when we add
them together we get a maximum index value of 1000.

The
book compares the score of the Eastern world against the Western world throughout
history and concludes that the East will regain superiority in 2103.

By the
way, what did the spooks want? They wanted to understand Morris’ theories so
they could incorporate them into a National Intelligence Council report
documenting global trends, to be used to guide the next administration. I
wonder how they validated his theory? Did they just accept it as the truth
coming out of research by an expert in history? Who knows.

I
have two large problems with Morris’ book and the reception to it. Let’s start with the latter. To
quote one of the reviews of the book,

“Morris's success at finding an audience for that big story comes
at a time of anxiety about the waning
influence of historians, whose work is often hyper-specialized. Kenneth
Pomeranz, president of the American Historical Association, recently lamented that "our space in the public sphere has been
diminished to the benefit of fields like economics."

The reviewer plays this game – “Look
history is relevant again. It’s useful”, as if he had a clue about the subject.
And then we have the following:

“Why the West Rules won praise
in publications like The Economist and the Financial
Times, which called it "the first history of the world that really
makes use of what modern technology can offer to the interpretation of the
historical process."

Which brings me to my second problem.
I don’t buy the notion that history has to create some way to be relevant in
order to impart value. It doesn’t need a technological methodology at all,
because it’s one of the subjects of the Humanities, not the computer science
department.

Morris reminds me of what’s wrong
with the progressive movement. Its adherents have substituted science for God,
and worse, they believe their science. Remember that FDR intended to appoint a
board of economists who were going to dictate policy to all American
corporations as part of an industrial plan. Funny to think anyone thought something
as complicated as our economy could be reduced to a set of equations.

But here we have Morris trying to do
the same with history. Who said there are four factors that influence the
accomplishments of a society? Who says they should be equally weighted? Why go
through the exercise when the assumptions are faulty? Now I’m not ready to
condemn the factors and trends Morris cites. He is a well-respected historian. But
when you quantify something, people assume the numbers are useful for
comparison purposes, and they parse them up way beyond their relevance.

And I have do have a complaint about
the foundation ideas of the theorem and index. Morris is materialistic – a little
bit Marxian. His theorem gives no credit to ideas as contributors to the
success of societies, like no one ever thought of something that really
mattered. Huh?

I guess if it sells books and gets
the spooks interested it has value. We trust the spooks, don’t we?